Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. He writes on Substack, at Ross on Why?
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No wonder government ministers in recent weeks have started nodding along with fears that AI will take our jobs, with investment minister Lord Stockwood even suggesting that the government has discussed the idea of a universal basic income to provide for people thrown out of work by the technology. God forbid that voters should start
Irresponsible Trump, responsible China; that is the message BBC climate editor Justin Rowlatt seemed to be sending us by juxtaposing the news that the US president had repealed Barack Obama’s ‘endangerment finding’ and that China’s carbon emissions fell slightly last year. Trump’s critics like to portray him as a rogue figure in a world which is
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Jim Ratcliffe is not a polished media performer, and neither does he have an accurate set of UK demographic statistics in his head. But how typical that the Prime Minister and his Labour colleagues, as well as the Guardian and many others, have chosen to latch onto a loose remark the billionaire Manchester United co-owner made
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It looks as if £300 will end up being to Ed Miliband what 45 minutes was to Tony Blair: the number which will forever hang around his neck, dragging him down whatever else he tries to do in politics. Of late, Miliband seems to have stopped repeating his promise to cut £300 from our electricity
As a general rule, once a city erects turnstiles to tourist attractions which were once free to visit, it is time to go elsewhere. Never more so than in the case of Rome. Last week the Italian capital introduced a €2 charge to visit the Trevi Fountain. Tight-fisted tourists like me will still be able to
Nothing excuses the manner of Peter Mandelson’s communications with Jeffrey Epstein both before and after the latter’s conviction for sex offences. Nor are the lies which Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor told about breaking off relations with Epstein defensible. Nevertheless, there is something disturbing about what looks like being the inevitable fallout of the Epstein scandal: that no
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That will teach people who seek a diagnosis of ADHD in the hope that it will bring them various advantages in life. Merlin Entertainments, which runs Alton Towers, has announced that in future it will no longer allow the condition to be used as an excuse to jump its queues. If you want a shortcut,
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Like Harold Wilson and his ill-defined ‘white heat of technology’, Keir Starmer has latched on to artificial intelligence as the saviour which is finally going to jolt Britain’s sluggish economy into growth. He once even suggested it would help fill potholes. A year ago he launched his AI Opportunities Action Plan, which is supposed to
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‘It’s Scotland’s oil,’ cried the slogan of the SNP in the 1970s when the party first began a serious drive for Scottish independence. Not according to the current Labour government at Westminster, it isn’t. The oil doesn’t belong to Britain, either, but to the Earth – and that is where it will stay if Ed
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Donald Trump’s tendency to exaggerate and make up figures as he goes along is for some people a symptom of the ‘post-truth society’. But for the president himself it is a useful rhetorical tool which helps draws attention to things which might otherwise get less of an airing. Yes, it is a gross exaggeration to
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The cowboys must be licking their lips. Ed Miliband has come up with yet another green homes scheme to chuck public money at subsidised energy improvements. The Warm Homes Plan will allocate £15 billion to grants and low-cost loans for homeowners who want to upgrade their insulation, and fit heat pumps and solar panels. According
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The excruciating thing about Donald Trump is that the madder and more unreasonable he seems to become, the more he catches everyone out when he says something that is utterly true. The US president’s manoeuvres on Greenland are the act of a bully and autocrat; for him to suggest that he wants Greenland as compensation for
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Normally rail ticket prices are raised in line with the Retail Prices Index (RPI) plus 3 per cent. This January, unusually, they didn’t increase. But that is not how it will feel if you fancy a short break in Edinburgh. In that case, you may well find yourself paying double what you used to pay.
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How grim things are suddenly looking for Nigel Farage and Reform UK. It isn’t that their poll ratings are crashing – in spite of a minor decline in the polls in recent weeks, the party still holds a commanding lead. For the moment, the outcome of the next election continues to look like being either
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Remember the summer of 2022 when politicians from Ed Miliband to Boris Johnson went around telling us that wind energy was ‘four times cheaper’ than electricity generated by gas. It wasn’t true then – even at the top of the spike in gas prices which followed the Ukraine invasion. But it looks like an absurd
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‘Evidence-based policy-making’ is very much in vogue – until, that is, the evidence doesn’t quite support what the government wants to do. Then governments tend to plough on ahead anyway, evidence or not. Just why is the government proposing to lower the drink-driving limit in England from 80mg/100ml to 50mg/100ml? To many people, government ministers
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Shock horror. A Cambridge college has realised that to recruit the brightest students sometimes you have to encourage students from private schools as well as state comprehensives in poor neighbourhoods. You can almost feel the foundations of higher education quivering at Trinity Hall’s decision to write to private schools to encourage pupils to apply for certain
One remarkable thing about Donald Trump’s adventure in Venezuela is just how old-fashioned it is. It is a world away from George W. Bush’s neoconservative efforts at nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is little attempt to justify the arrest of Nicolás Maduro in terms of the human rights of Venezuelan citizens. Little attention appears
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It is easy to see the political attraction for Nigel Farage of promising to reverse Rachel Reeves’s decision to end the 5 pence cut in road fuel duty. The idea that we are in the midst of a cost of living crisis has not gone away – in spite of the fact that, notionally, average
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As Keir Starmer found out with digital ID, what the public initially says it wants isn’t always what it turns out to want once the details become clear. A large majority in favour of digital ID turned into a significant majority against once people started to ask themselves: is this scheme really going to tackle
